After chef and food writer Allison Robicelli left New York, she thought she'd never find exotic ingredients within arm's reach again. But that was before she stepped through the doors of this Baltimore supermarket.

It was time to leave New York. Sure, the best part of my life in Brooklyn was how many food cultures were within arm's reach. The bodega on the corner sold cigarettes in the front, dried chiles in the back. Within 10 minutes of my place there over a dozen supermarkets, each with their own specialty demographic, from the full-contact shopping experience at Fei Long Asian Supermarket to the caviar bar at Gourmanoff in Brighton “Little Odessa” Beach. But then gentrification swept the city, and tenement apartments that pretty much gave you cholera just by looking at them started renting for $5,000 a month. I'd stop into Whole Foods to find the cheap food I was teased for eating as a child being sold for ten times the price.

I moved to Baltimore last year because it, in many ways, reminded me of the NYC of my youth, but its downside is a lack of diversity—for the most part, this is a city where almost everyone is a longtime American. My corner store has little of interest to me past eggs and milk. And the best thing you can say about my local supermarket is that it's so spacious that there's more than enough room in the aisle for two, nay three entire shopping carts, to stand side by side. Most weeks these work for me—my life as of late has been working nonstop while taking care of two sons who growing at a rate that requires many daily feeding sessions of raw materials, much as you would nurture a small bear or growing giraffe. Home cooking is currently not for pleasure, and when you’re just trying to get the job done, rotisserie chicken and baby carrots will do. I don't need a supermarket that offers corn smut to stuff my nonexistent huitlacoche tacos.

There are moments where I become very darkly sad about this. I’m a good cook. Nay, I’m an amazing cook. When I’m in a good mood and giving 110% at the stove, I remember what a catch of a wife and mother I am, why I had all those “best of NYC” awards in my press kit. My skills in the kitchen have defined who I have been, personally and professionally, for over 15 years. I have gained so much by moving here, but the muses that filled my head with passion and ideas as I would stroll through those international markets were left behind in Brooklyn.

A world tour, painted in brightly colored high-fructose corn syrup.

Photo by Allison Robicelli

But I refused to become the kind of cook who isn't recognizable to herself. Those intrepid, well-traveled markets had to be somewhere within Baltimore's city limits. So I started to hunt, searching patiently online and vigorously interrogating locals. Turns out, here in Baltimore, the ethnic megamarkets only congregated outside the city limits. While my generation's immigrant ancestors settled in cities to earn enough so their kids could flee to suburbia, now it seems that immigrants around these parts cut out the city chapter and go straight for the picket fence.

I’d driven past it a dozen times before, thinking it was just another unremarkable urban supermarket in a quirky neighborhood filled with Hispanics and hipsters and hard-nosed “Balmer” old-timers. It’s as bland outside as it is inside, with the long aisles of drab shelving, meat in the back and shopping carts with wonky wheels up front. How was I to know that this would be the place that would save the soul of a downtrodden, overqualified home cook? That this market would be my Lourdes, just with a few more in-store coupons and flickering fluorescent lights? This is a market that makes me want to Jesus and, um, cook.

The infamous chile wall.

Photo by Allison Robicelli

Between the standard items like Frosted Flakes and cat food and jumbo rolls of paper towels is an array of ingredients from every ethnic supermarket in New York City, magically transplanted. There's no capsule collection of dried chiles here—instead, you will confronted by a WALL of chiles, and turning 90 degrees will bring you to a second wall of chiles. Each country in Latin America has their own special kind, you know? That’s why if you walk across the store to the dairy section, you’ll find yet another wall—this one for Columbian chiles. There are least three separate areas devoted to spices, where you can buy amchur (aka dried sour mango powder), helba (aka fenugreek), Vegeta (a vegetable bouillon powder invented by a Bosnian Croat scientist in 1959), mukhwab, Jamaican Choice curry powder, and Aji-No-Moto MSG, proudly manufactured in America’s heartland. There’s ten varieties of canela (that super-perfumed Mexican cinnamon), which is right next to the shelf full of jaggery (super-molasses-y Indian sugar). There’s crema from El Salvador and crema from Honduras, because those are two different things. They have five different international flavors of Tang.

I go to the Market at Highlandtown with no list, no agenda. I go to get lost, to fill my cart with things that make me dream and learn and rush home like a giddy mad scientist whose about to make a major breakthrough in scone technology. I stuff my cabinets with Lebanese almond oil and black rice and the deep cuts from the Goya catalog. I make my kids their mac and cheese, and stir some aji amarillo into the bite I always steal. I fill a batch of cinnamon rolls with that canela and jaggery, and put it into the fridge to bake in the morning. I go to sleep that night knowing I’m home again.